 Throughout my life as an athlete, I'd always sought ways in which I could enhance my performance naturally, legally. And that meant some sort of dietary information or manipulation, supplements if that was the case. So I was always a student of the human body, of human physiology, of evolution as time went on, of gene expression and how genetic science really factors into a lot of what we're talking about today. And I started simply understanding that fats weren't necessarily the bad guy that they were made out to be in the 70s, 80s and 90s. So I started incorporating more fats in my diet. And as I stopped training or cut way back on my training, and I didn't need that many calories, I was adding in a little bit more of the fat. I was always eating protein. I started to look at the amount of sugar I was eating. And I thought, well, this isn't necessary anymore because I'm not running the miles. I'm not burning the calories. I'm not filling the glycogen stores and all of this. And so I started to cut back on the sugar and I noticed I felt better from that. And so I went for another decade writing books about training and writing books about optimizing your diet for training, starting to write books for the general public about how to lose weight by using dietary manipulation. However, I still suffered my own set of maladies. I still had irritable bowel syndrome that ran my life. I had arthritis in my feet. I had osteoarthritis in my feet that I thought was partly a result of my running career and partly just a natural artifact of being older. But I couldn't grip a golf club and that was like weird to me. So I had the arthritis. I had tenonitis on a regular base. I had all these itises. And that wasn't right for a guy who was trying to be not just fit but now healthy. And you're a world expert on health. And I'm a world expert on health. And you see this a lot in our field. You see experts who still behind the curtain, they're suffering and they've got all the maladies that they write about and talk about. In my case, when I was 47, my wife, last year, really, it's going on 20 years ago, pal. When I was 47, my wife said, look, you're writing about how bad grain is for you. Because I've done a lot of research on gluten and glide and then xyne and corn and all of the other, you know, these anti-nutrients, these tightly folded proteins. And she said, you're writing about all this grain stuff. You still have grain in your diet. What's that about? I'm like, well, I'm defending my right to eat grain because I don't think that's the cause of anything that's going on with me. She said, well, why don't you give up grain for 30 days? Well, I gave up grain for 30 days and it absolutely transformed my life. It was the most amazing transformation. The arthritis in my feet went away. The irritable bowel syndrome that, again, was like running my life since the age of 14 went away. The gird that I experienced, you know, weird places like sitting back in an airplane seat or something like that in the wrong position, that went away. I had hemorrhoids for much of my life, went away. You know, the sinus infections that would linger after a cold, the stuffed up head that just wouldn't seem to... That went away. It was like, it was incredible, this transformation from having given up this one food group that I was told my whole life was an important part of a healthy... The cornerstone of a healthy diet, 6 to 11 servings a day. Well, that was such an aha moment for me that I really shifted everything to looking at, okay, if I'm a guy who defended my right to eat grains in the face of all this evidence, how many millions, tens of millions of people are out there suffering the same sorts of things I am? They may not be celiac, they may not be, you know, gluten intolerant on certain tests, but there's something about their consumption of grains that's probably interfering with their enjoyment of life to the fullest extent. That became the impetus for my looking into the evolution of the human diet and how our genes, you know, turn on or off in response to certain inputs that we give them. Many of these inputs have to do with food and the foods that we choose to consume. So a lot of people are confused by all these names. What's the difference between a paleoprimal diet and a keto-primal diet? Right. So it becomes nuanced at this point. It's really all of these diets that tend to work mostly work because of the things you're not eating. Yeah. Okay, so when you eliminate the offending foods, when you eliminate the sugars, the sugary drinks, the pies, cakes, candies, cookies, sorry people, the breads, the pastas, the cereals, and you come down to this list of natural, real food, meat, fish, fowl, eggs, nuts, seeds, vegetables, a little bit of fruit, some starchy tubers, that's real food. That's what the body is equipped to handle. So paleo really looked at that cornucopia of foods as basically as much as you want, as often as you want, because you're not eating the toxic franken foods that society has created for us. Primal kind of looked at that and said, well, maybe there's some things that we can add because paleo tended to think in terms of like dairy being off limits because until we started herding animals 10,000 years ago, our ancestors didn't consume dairy. We went into a whole discussion about why I think dairy is appropriate under certain circumstances. But all these foods exist on the spectrum too. I mean, any food that you talk about, I can give you exceptionally great versions of those foods and horribly toxic versions of those foods. So when we talk about dairy, for instance, you know, 2% skim homogenized pasteurized, forget it. It's nasty stuff. It's A1 casein, which is a completely different casein from which most of us evolved to digest easily. On the other hand, you've got ghee and butter and artisanal cheeses, and I think they're great. Raw milk, if you can get it for some people, it's great. So dairy became one of those little touch points where paleo said, we're not going to do dairy and I said, primal, I said, look, if you're not lactose intolerant, then I think dairy's fine. A little bit of chocolate once in a while, a little bit of red wine. I mean, I wanted to be as inclusive as possible with a primal blueprint. I wanted to create a list of foods that people didn't feel like they were giving up. They were sacrificing in large quantities all the foods, all the comfort foods that they'd eaten over time. Now as paleo and then primal sort of became more mainstream, we start talking about keto and what is keto? Keto, the ketogenic diet, and it's a little bit of an elaborate discussion here, but the body runs on fats and carbohydrates mostly. And the three macronutrients that we talk about are fats, proteins and carbohydrates. Well, proteins are largely structural, so we want to consume protein just to rebuild our bodies. But fats and carbohydrates have been sort of the fuel that we've used. We were born with this amazing default setting that would allow us to derive most of our energy from fat, from stored body fat. In the absence of food or fuel, historically over millions of years, which was generally the case for most people, you didn't have three square meals a day, you'd go, you'd miss meals, you'd miss days. You'd go days without eating and you had to maintain energy and you had to maintain muscle mass. The body evolved in an incredible system to take some of the stored body fat, combust that as fuel in the muscles, take other parts of that fat, send it to the liver, and make another fuel that we call ketones. Most people don't even know about the existence of ketones, but ketones are, as they say, we're born with this amazing ability to create these ketones. The liver, under the right circumstances, the liver can make 750 calories a day worth of this fuel. Worth of ketones. So the idea behind the ketogenic diet was, let's get away from this dependency on carbohydrates. Let's get away from this having to eat carbohydrates every couple of hours and have our blood sugar go up because the carbs convert to glucose and that causes insulin and then insulin takes the glucose out of the bloodstream because it wants to get rid of it and our blood sugar drops and we get hungry again and we have to eat more carbs and you go on this roller coaster all day long. And when I say all day long, I'm talking for decades. Most people start with the first meal, the first solid food their parents give them is carbohydrate based. So we lose this ability to burn fat, we lose this ability to make ketones and use ketones efficiently. We become carbohydrate dependent for most of our lives. So the ketogenic diet and what we call keto in general is a way of training your body to get back to this flexibility, this metabolic flexibility where the body can extract energy not just from carbohydrates, which most people do, but from fat on your plate of food, the fat on your hips and thighs and belly, the carbohydrate on your plate of food, the glucose in your bloodstream, the glycogen in your muscles, the ketones that your liver is making and you become metabolically flexible to the extent that you don't really ever run out of energy because you always have an energy source. Your body knows how to take, if there's no food immediately available, the body just goes, hmm, I think I'll take it off my thighs and combust it in the muscles, I'll send some to the liver, I'll send the ketones that are made there to fuel the brain, we won't need carbohydrates, we'll go as long as you want. Couple meals, couple days, we don't care, we got this handled. So the body, we train the body to become metabolically flexible this way. The other thing, and I think the most important aspect of this, is that hunger, appetite and cravings dissipate or go away in many cases. So where most people who are carbohydrate dependent are living one meal to the next, like, okay, we just had breakfast, what time's lunch? I better have a snack before lunch. Gotta have a snack, a mid-morning coffee break in the morning, or pick me up because I'm gonna feel like taking a nap at 2.30 or 3 o'clock in the afternoon if I don't have a bagel or an energy bar, that's the latest one, and then go home and have dinner and then maybe have a snack watching TV. This is not only antithetical to health, it's also a pattern that most people in this country engage in. We just weigh too much food and the problem is it's driven by hunger. People actually feel hunger because it's a hormonal dysregulation that they're causing by their choices of food, and so if I can educate and instruct people on other choices of food that would have a different effect and would cause their bodies to upregulate enzyme systems that take fat out of storage and combust it, that would upregulate enzyme systems that help in the conversion of other fats into ketones to use as fuel, that would improve what we call mitochondrial biogenesis, actually increase the number of power plants in the cell where the fat burns, improve the efficiency of those power plants, of those mitochondria. You literally repattern, reprogram your body to become fat-adapted and keto-adapted, and it is such a sense of freedom for everybody who does this.